Is this the greatest first line ever?

"Did I ever tell you about the time I found myself locked in a cupboard with a stunning seventeen-year-old blonde nymphomaniac who couldn't keep her hands off me? Worst moment of my life."

No, it's OK, don't worry. I don't really think that those first lines wot I wrote quite qualify as the best ever. Not when they're up against the opening to Pride And Prejudice, or the oft-quoted Anthony Burgess one about the archbishop and the catamite, or good old "Call me Ishmael."

Still, I do hope that that opener from my new WWII adventure yarn Coward At The Bridge (if you want to see what happens next read on here) is reasonably grabby. Problem is it's a bit of a cheat. It only becomes properly interesting when qualified by the second sentence "Worst moment of my life". Only at that point do you really want to know more because you're going: "What? Eh? What could possibly be your problem with being stuck in a cupboard with a seventeen-year-old blonde nymphomaniac? Is it the hair colour you don't like? Is it the age thing? Are you gay?"

It's for the same reason that I think Camus's L'Etranger is out of the running. "Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know," is, yes, all very alienated and existentialist and slightly sinister and so on. But it's still two sentences not one.

I also hate: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," which besides being two sentences is also incredibly annoying. Everyone quotes this statement – it's from Tolstoy's Anna Karenina – as if it's charged with deep wisdom and insight. And it's not, it's just drivel. I'll bet there are loads of happy families which are unalike and loads of unhappy ones which are very similar.

As for Anthony Burgess's "It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me" – it's very memorable and quotable but it's also overworked and self-conscious. "I want to be the most oft-cited opening line in modern literature," it shrieks. And sure enough it is.

So what's your favourite line? If you were Guardian blog readers I'm sure you'd come up with loads. Now is your chance, as Telegraph blog readers, to demonstrate that you're not just a bunch of pink-faced colonels who only ever read Jeffrey Archer and, at a push, Trollope. Now is your chance to show those pinko Guardian types that you too are cultured.

To be honest I'm not sure what my own favourite first line is – I only know my best movie one: "Saigon. Shit", except again that's two, isn't it? – but my friend Sam Leith came up with a good suggestion.

He likes:

"'Bugger!' said Rose, and dropped the secateurs," from a novel by Alice Thomas Ellis.

Sam likes it because it tells you so much in so short a space: the class and age of the woman; the decade in which it's set. And also, because like all the best opening lines, it makes you so keen to read on.